There's a lot of visual novels that deal with fairly mundane subject matter, like lame teenage high-school dating and whatnot. I guess they do pretty well. In Japan at least. Though they typically at least have anime style multi-color hair and whatnot. I guess you could make one with photos of real people rather than anime/manga drawings. Which I imagine has even been done. But to what success, I have no idea. Probably not very much..